


edmontonia nodosauridae

by Canneberge



Category: IT (1990), IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, M/M, Teenage Losers Club (IT), also canon typical everything. internalized homophobia, but a canon typical level, canon atypical level of stan representation, canon typical self-indulgent number of maine references, gratuitous losers club friendship, like.. seniors in hs, not really canon typical, so i can live out the unattainable fantasy of a medium-sized group of close friends, teddie peanut butter! renys!, well...... ok
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:08:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27692578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canneberge/pseuds/Canneberge
Summary: /ON HIATUS/A stripe of light flares off Richie's glasses, and Eddie prays that it won't betray their hiding place. "Do you trust me?" Richie whispers."Yes. More than anyone."Richie nods, jaw set."Except Bill." Before he can react, Eddie adds, "And Mike.""Well --""And probably Stan.""W --""And my dad. If he was alive.""You trust your dead dad more than me?!" Richie yelps."If he was alive," Eddie reiterates, pitching his voice extra-low to remind him to keep it the fuck down.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak & Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak & The Losers Club, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris
Comments: 44
Kudos: 27





	1. the kenduskeag river

**Author's Note:**

> the idea for this literally came to me in a dream which is maybe a sign that i should not bring it into existence but also….. all of the literary masterpieces of my generation came from a dream: twilight,
> 
> anyway i couldnt stop thinking about it and the only thing stopping me was that it couldnt have patty. and then i realized it has dinosaurs so like.. pretty sure it can also have patty blum uris. another change from canon (other than, like, the obvious) is that they’re all still in derry even though theyre like 18 because i really didnt want to have to slog through 10k of ‘heres how they all found each other again’ before i got started. the pacing of this chapter is still a little fucked because i wanted to get to the exciting part so.. rip. anyway, excuse the entire premise and mind the tags <3
> 
> anyway. JURASSIC PARK AU

_1994_

The summer after high school is weird. 

Summer has always meant a total reset. They have a different New Year’s in China; the world of adults is basically a different country; it doesn’t seem so impossible that people in America under the age of eighteen have their own New Year’s on June eleventh. Or maybe September fourth. Or somewhere in between. Eddie doesn’t know. What he does know is that the end of one school year has always meant an impossibly long stretch of time before the next one, time with a different quality than the time you spend in class. Stuff that happens during the summer has always seemed realer, somehow. Then summer ends, and a new school year starts, and the clock resets. 

Only now the clock has wound down. His time’s up. When this summer ends, he’s not restarting the cycle, he’s going God-only-knows-where 

_ (NEW YORK?!)  _

(Eddie-bear there’s  _ rats  _ in New York and rats carry  _ disease  _ Eddie don’t you know there’s  _ AIDS  _ in New York?!)

to be… what? To be an adult?

He’s not ready. He wants this summer to last the way all the others have, with the days pulling like hot taffy until he’s almost excited to go back to class, even though he’d never tell anyone except Stan, and maybe Ben, who can sympathize. But as soon as the last bell rings and he clatters down the steps of the school building to ceremonially dump his books in the trash can out front, just like he does every year, he knows this summer is gonna go too fucking fast. He watches his books fall into the trash can, on top of a half-eaten apple that Stan has to hold Richie back from eating so Bill will give him two dollars, and he thinks:  _ this is the last time.  _ And then it’ll be time for him to head off into a world where summer is just a season and everything is too big and you can get AIDS from taking the subway. Or from fucking strange men. Which he definitely,  _ definitely  _ isn’t ready for. He isn’t even ready to  _ think  _ about it.

So when the pamphlet comes in the mail (he tries to get the mail before his mom can, because one time Richie spent thirty dollars to mail him a life-size Stan replica even though they live, like, three blocks away from each other) he stops with his hand over the recycling bin and folds it into the back pocket of his jeans before he can think about it too much.

It’s all anyone can talk about that summer. They found out about it in May, and after that every table in the cafeteria was buzzing with one topic, even after Ed Miller got caught having sex with Greta Bowie in the mascot’s tiger costume. The lucky seven have talked about it before, but they’ve never really entertained the idea of trying to  _ go  _ until Eddie brings it up to Ben, Bill, and Richie the day after he gets the pamphlet. They’re out by the Kenduskeag, where it narrows enough to wade in without making Eddie get sweaty about one of them getting undertowed out to the Atlantic, just dicking around. Ben is laid up on his stomach by the edge of the stream, sticking twigs in the soft silty dirt, trying to make them stand in a little frame. A mock-up for some future construction project, maybe. Bill and Richie are in the water, doing… something. Eddie doesn’t even want to know. It involves a lot of splashing and possibly punching (?). Bill has his shirt off. The Eddie of fifth grade is losing his fucking mind. Current Eddie is unimpressed. (Like, 80% unimpressed.)

He sticks two fingers in his back pocket, feeling for the crumpled paper of the pamphlet, and digs it out. Before he says anything he takes a moment to reread it, making sure it says what he thinks it does. 

_ COME TO ISLA NUBLAR ON US*! _

_ Qualified students (grades 8-12) apply using the attached form. You and four friends could visit the Jurassic Park FREE*!! _

“What’s that?” 

Eddie looks up. He’s captured Ben’s attention. He flips the pamphlet so Ben can read it. “They’re offering scholarships to Jurassic Park. ‘Travel, lodging, and entrance paid,’” he rattles off, scanning the back side of the brochure. “I mean, I know we’d never get it, but I thought, it could be fun, and…”

“And I don’t think  _ I  _ could forgive myself if I never tried,” Ben says, nodding. “I mean,  _ dinosaurs.”  _ His face isn’t as round as it used to be, not since he discovered his passion for weightlifting (“It helps me with building stuff,” he’d explained to Eddie once, blushing like it was an embarrassing secret) and started standing up to his mother about not eating more than he wanted to eat. But even without the chubby cheeks, his face still shines in the same way it always has.

_ Dinosaurs. _

“Yeah,” Eddie agrees. He looks back down at the leaflet. “I mean, imagine.”

“Could we all go?” Ben asks. “If we won, I mean.”

Eddie squints at the fine print. “I think so. It doesn’t say anything about… oh, here. Uh… it looks like one room, but admission is included with the hotel stay, so… two of us would have to pay our own travel, I guess.”

“And we’d have to all sleep in one room,” Ben points out.

“Somehow I think we could manage it,” Eddie says, smirking. They haven’t hung out in the clubhouse in years, but they used to pile into it for sleepovers, the kind where everyone told his mom he was at the next guy’s house and Bev made up some lie about Sally Mueller. Eddie had to climb out his window for them, but it was worth it. Once they did it during the winter, and while Ben Hanscom might have been some type of architectural genius, he had not, at eleven, discovered the magic of insulation. They would have fucking frozen if it weren’t for the fact that there were seven of them crammed into a five-by-five cube like rodents in a burrow.

So, yeah. They could handle sharing a hotel room.

“What do we have to do?” Ben asks, hefting himself up off the sand to get a better look.

“Write an essay,” Eddie says. “About why we’re deserving. I figure even without the -- you know, the stuff we’ve done -- we got the only Black person in Maine, Stanley ‘the Jew’ Uris, Stuttering Bill…” He rattles off their panderable sob stories on his fingers.

“And Bev,” Ben says. His face does the misty thing it always does when he says her name or looks at her, but just for a second.

“Yeah, putting up with us she deserves a medal,” Eddie says, like a bunch of rowdy teenage boys who love her like she’s their sun are the worst thing Bev has to live with.

Ben opens his mouth, smiling, but before he can say anything, Richie and Bill have come over to see what they’re talking about and Eddie has to start his explanation over from the beginning. He makes a mental note to bring it up to Mike, Stan, and Bev together, so he doesn’t have to do this five times. “Richie, stop dripping on me,” he says when he finishes, so Richie shakes his head like a dog and sprays water on all of them. Eddie holds the pamphlet up as a shield. A part of him wishes he could take it in sardonic silence like Stan does, but he can’t; he yells obligingly and makes a comment about Richie needing a haircut so he doesn’t absorb so much water.

“I could never,” Richie grins. “I look like Bon Jovi.”

“Sure, if Bon Jovi weighed ninety p-p-p-pounds and his mom wouldn’t pay for c-contacts,” Bill says. He’s grinning too. Richie cuffs him, and they tussle.

Eddie clears his throat.

“Sorry, Educcine Alfredo,” Richie says. “Carry on.”

“I’m done! That was the whole thing! Do you need me to say it again? Jesus, Richie, you really need to start fucking listening when people talk to you --”

“Dinosaurs,” Ben interrupts. All eyes turn to him. He blushes. “Sorry. I just -- I mean, that’s what Eddie was getting at. That’s the most important thing, isn’t it?”

“And you think we c-c-could win?” Bill asks thoughtfully.

Eddie shrugs. “Well, why the hell not?”

“Cause we’d have to write a essay?”

“Yeah, Rich, well, the rest of us are literate, so I think we can manage.”

“Oh!” Richie clasps his hands to his damp t-shirt like he’s been shot. “Eds gets off a good one!”

His attention already back on the pamphlet, Eddie only halfheartedly mumbles, “Don’t call me Eds. You know, I really think we could do this.”

“N-not without everyone, though,” Bill says, and Eddie nods his agreement. 

“No. Not without everyone.”

So they meet up, the seven of them, as soon as they can find a day where no one has work or a date or some other stupid, pre-adult obligation. It takes so long to find a day where no one has a “prior obligation” (and fuck if  _ that  _ doesn’t sound like something a forty-year-old would say) that they almost miss the deadline.

Eddie explains the scholarship again, and he’s gratified to see the other three’s eyes light up. 

“You know, they say birds are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs,” Stan says. “It would be pretty neat to see an  _ Argentavis _ .”

“No one has any idea what that is, Stanny,” Richie says, slinging a friendly arm around Stan’s shoulder. 

“Can’t say I’m too excited about the prospect of giant birds, but I’m in,” Mike says. “I’d love to get out of Derry for the weekend.”

“Also,  _ dinosaurs,”  _ Bev reminds him. “I’m in. Of course I’m in. What do we have to do, Eddie?”

They write the essay together, all seven of them crowded around a table in the library in the way that they haven’t in…  _ years,  _ Jesus. It’s stuffy in the library, not quite unpleasant. Eddie isn’t so skinny as he used to be, but it still takes a lot to warm him through. With the six of them pressed around him, Richie’s fingers in his hair, chin on the crown of his head, and Bev leaning across the table to point at something with one green-lacquered fingernail, and Mike and Ben actually researching things for them to include; with Bill trying to keep them in some level of order so that the librarian doesn’t kick them out, and Stan offering sob stories (some about growing up Jewish; most about dealing with Richie), Eddie thinks he wouldn’t care if they didn’t win, because he has this. And with all of them piled around him, insulating him, he feels warm.

The envelope is shiny and green. He doesn’t open it until they’re all together. 

“I can’t read it,” he says, holding the letter out with his eyes closed. “Someone else read it. Big Bill, tell me if we got it.”

“Sh-sh-sure, just give me twenty m-minutes,” Bill says. “Ask someone who can say ‘puh-puh-puh-puh-park’.” His smile is good-natured, and Eddie is pretty sure he’s exaggerating how hard it is for him to say  _ park,  _ but there’s something a little sad in his eyes.

Richie crows with delight at Bill’s self-deprecation (“Yowza-yowza- _ yowza!”)  _ and snags the envelope, ripping it open unceremoniously. He puts on an announcer Voice. It’s British-adjecent. “‘We at Jurassic Park are pleased to announce --’ Holy  _ shit! _ Holy,  _ shit,  _ you guys!” 

Bev squeals. Then they’re all hugging, and Eddie is warm again, all the way to his core.

_ Two and a half more months of this,  _ he thinks, and holds them tighter.

Winning the scholarship turns out to be the easy part. The hard part is convincing their parents to let them go. Neither Eddie nor Bev even bother with the truth -- as far as Eddie’s ma knows, he’s going to a model car convention with the Denbroughs; one to which they will be  _ driving,  _ not taking a plane. Even with the lie, getting her to let him out of her sight for three nights takes a medium amount of blackmail. Bev tells her parents that it’s a school trip, and they press her a little since it’s summer, but she’s gotten good at lying, she tells Eddie, wearing the same expression Bill did when he was making fun of his stutter. The rest of them make the mistake of telling their parents the truth. Bill’s don’t give a shit, but the others have to dig themselves out of their own graves, especially Mike and Ben, whose parents are right on that un-ideal line between loving and overprotective, the line that Sonia Kaspbrak sprinted past about thirteen years ago.

In the end they figure it out. They raise the money. Eddie has way too much funning running a lemonade stand with Bev, the only other Loser without a real job, like they’re eight years old again. They make about fifteen dollars in three weeks until Bev starts wearing a tiny shirt and pressing her boobs together with her arms whenever a group of teenaged guys walks by.

“I think you’re undoing feminism or something,” Eddie says wryly, handing a cup of lemonade to a sophomore whose eyes are  _ not  _ on Eddie. He doesn't really care, but he feels obligated to say something.

Once the horny kid walks away, Bev says, “I can’t believe women lost the right to vote after I put on a halter top.” She shakes her head sadly. “Unfortunately, I don’t care, because we are making  _ bank.”  _

It’s true.

By the time August rolls around, one week before their send-off date, they have enough money. It still doesn’t seem possible. Up until their plane leaves the tarmac, Eddie refuses to believe that they’re actually going to make it. Even once they’re all in the airport, three hours early because Stan insisted they be, he’s jittery, waiting for his ma to come charging out of the crowd to drag him home.

“We g-got everything?” Bill asks. They’re sitting in a row at their gate, and he’s standing in front of them with his hands on his hips. He’s wearing an old fanny pack that Eddie dug out from under his bed. It really completes the dad image.

“Roger dodger, Buffalo Billy,” Richie says, saluting with his cigarette. 

“You’re going to put that out before we board, right?” Eddie asks, needing someplace to focus his nerves, which he’s starting to think might actually be about flying. The statistics have been ingrained in his mind since he was eleven years old. Which means he _knows_ that it’s actually safer than driving, but also that the possibility of dying is very much on his mind.

“I’m going to  _ smoke  _ it before we board,” Richie scoffs. “And probably like three more, because Stanny here insisted that we come a million hours early.”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t want us to miss our chance to see  _ dinosaurs  _ in  _ person,”  _ Stan says sarcastically from between them, not looking up from his brand-new book of prehistoric birds, which is propped open in his lap. It’s slim. There’s not that many prehistoric birds. 

“Yes, Bill, we have everything,” Bev says. 

“I already said that!” Richie yelps, affronted.

“It’s not like you’re exactly the most trustworthy person -- you said you had everything at your house and you almost forgot your  _ glasses --” _

“Well, I’m sorry, Spaghetti Man, but the  _ padre _ has me trying out contacts and if I can see I’m not thinking about it, am I? I can’t be expected to notice whether I have glasses on my face or not.”

There’s so much energy in Eddie he feels like he’s going to explode. _Over one hundred planes crash a year and no one knows where you are and if you die up there ma is going to wonder forever because you_ lied _to_ _her and she doesn’t know!_ “Yes you fucking can! They’re on your fucking _face!”_ Eddie gestures so hard he smacks Stan in the face.

“And I am moving,” Stan says calmly, standing up and closing his book with one finger in to mark his spot. “Anyone else want to sit in the danger zone?”

Eddie recedes into his seat, arms crossed and glowering. “I’m -- !” He wilts. “I’m sorry, guys. I’m just… I’m a little stressed about… this.” 

Bev squeezes his shoulder. “It’s okay, Eddie. I am, too. I don’t like lying to my parents.”

Ben looks horrified. “You guys are lying to your parents?!”

“Football camp,” Mike confirms.

“I thought you told them!”

“I did originally,” Mike says. “But they were  _ not  _ down with it. I had to pretend I dropped it and then come up with another reason to be gone this weekend. Good thing I didn’t tell them when the Park trip was or they’d never have believed it.”

Ben looks to the rest of them, his eyes round.

“School,” Bev chimes in.

He turns to Bill.

“Suh-suh-suh-speech therapy. I think they might have actually paid for that. I gave them the name of a real place,” Bill says, looking guilty. “They were fine with the puh-puh-park, but then they f-found out how much travel cost, and they shuh-shut it down.”

“Model car exhibition.” 

“Bird exhibition. In the same convention center as Eddie’s car convention, if you can believe it!”

Richie raises two fingers. “I told  _ my  _ parents the truth, Benny. Whole way through. I didn’t backpedal like an asshole.”

“If I didn’t buh-buh-backpedal I wouldn’t be here!” Bill looks incensed and even guiltier than he did before.

“Can we not talk about lying to our parents, please?” Eddie says. He feels queasy.

Richie grins. “Want to talk about how we’re about to be flying through the air at five hundred and seventy-five miles per hour?”

Eddie squeezes his eyes shut. “How d’you know how fast a plane goes?”

“Because you’ve been talking about it all week.” Even with his eyes closed, he can hear Richie’s grin widening. He can also hear Stan thumping him on the shoulder, which is gratifying. Has he really been talking about it? And he’d thought he was doing so well hiding his stress. “Don’t worry, Eds. I’ll be holding your hand the whole way.”

Without opening his eyes, Eddie flips him off.


	2. bangor international

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my g-d there was only one bed  
> bedroom inspired by these motherfuckers: https://www.greatwolf.com/grand-mound/suites/themed/wolf-den-suite-standard

It’s not easy for Eddie to admit when his mother is right about something. There was a time when he thought she was right about everything -- he thinks every kid feels that way, for a while. Now, though, ever since the summer when he broke his arm, it’s hard to believe any of the shit she says about stuff being unsafe or dirty or whatever the fuck else. Hard to believe; easy to internalize.

Anyway.

That being said.

Airplanes fucking  _ suck,  _ and he is one hundred percent going to die.

He grips the armrests of his blue-pleather seat. His short fingernails scrabble against the hard plastic like he’s sliding down a cliff face, digging for purchase. 

“I can feel your sweat falling on my leg,” Stan says. 

Eddie looks up at him blindly. “I have hyperhidrosis.”

“No you don’t,” Richie says, leaning across Stan. (He might have hallucinated it -- he had to use his inhaler three times before they got on the plane, and he hasn’t used it in months; it was the spare out of Richie’s backpack because he didn’t even think to bring his -- but he vaguely remembers a conversation about who was going to sit between him and Richie so they didn’t get ejected out of the airplane.) (Putting them on opposite sides of the aisle wasn’t an option, because then Richie would yell at him from across the plane. It’s a fine line they have to balance on.)

“Yes I do, dickhead,” Eddie says. “Look at this.” He holds up one palm. 

Stan’s face pinches. “Please don’t drip on me.”

Richie grabs his wrist and wipes it against Stan’s polo shirt. Stan looks resigned. 

“Stop wiping me on Stan!” Eddie tries to yank his arm back. It’s futile. Richie’s hand goes all the way around his wrist with room to spare. 

“Look!” Stan says, in the tone of a kindergarten teacher. “Cookies!” He produces a plastic baggie from the backpack under his seat and shakes it. 

“Cookies?!” Richie grabs them and stuffs one in his mouth. “These better not be oatmeal raisin.”

Stan raises one eyebrow. It’s a skill Eddie has always envied. “Well, you’re already eating it, so why don’t you tell me if it’s oatmeal raisin?” 

Crumbs fall onto Richie’s jeans as he chews. “Chocolate chip. Bless your heart, Staniel, ah say,  _ bless yer heart.” _

“Would you like one, Eddie?” Stan asks. He retrieves the bag and holds it out.

“ _ Do  _ you have any oatmeal raisin?” Eddie asks shyly. 

Stan digs through his backpack and comes out with another Ziploc full of cookies. “I didn’t want them to touch,” he explains, opening the bag and holding it out to Eddie, who takes a cookie. After a few seconds, Stan sighs and says, “Well, I hate to waste all this beautiful silence, but I have to pee. Eddie?”

Nodding, Eddie unbuckles his seatbelt and moves into the aisle so Stan can get out. When he sits back down, Richie tugs on his arm. 

“Can I help you?”

“Look out the window!” He jabs a finger at the window for emphasis, like Eddie isn’t going to know what he’s talking about.

“No! Do you  _ want  _ me to have another asthm -- panic attack?!” 

“But it’s so pretttyyyy,” he whines.

“Are you going to do this until I give in?” Eddie asks.

Tilting his head like a dog, Richie considers it. “Only until Stan gets back. Think you can hold out?”

“Probably not,” Eddie grumbles, already unbuckling his seatbelt again to slide into Stan’s seat. “What’s so -- holy shit.”

The window is small, about the size of a book that’s way longer than it needs to be. Two sheets of clear plastic separate him from suffocation by pressure loss. 

(Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’tthinkaboutit)

There’s frost on the outer layer, flaking out in sprays like a silvery-white Christmas wreath. And beyond that… The ground is a million miles away, but Eddie doesn’t feel dizzy like he thought he would. He’s not scared of falling, he realizes. He reaches one had out, pressing it to the cold window, wanting to be closer.

“Move,” he says, without taking his eyes off the window. Richie obliges. His seatbelt is already unbuckled, and he scoots to hover over Eddie, who fumbles the clasp of his own lap belt open and shoots into the window seat like the view will disappear if he isn’t fast enough.

The horizon line is tinged pink and blue and pale, creamy yellow, a color he’s never seen in the sky before, not even at sunset, but that isn’t what’s making him go haywire. It’s pretty, but it’s just… pretty.

Below that. 

The world is so small. He can barely pick out houses and cars. If there are people outside, they’re invisible to him. It’s just the things they’ve built that remain. His breath stains the window white with condensation, and he wipes it impatiently with his sleeve, drinking in the ground before it disappears under a cottony layer of cloud.

He leans back from the window. “That…”

Richie is looking at him with an expression like fondness. As soon as Eddie turns to him, he rearranges his face, so fast that Eddie’s blissed-out brain doesn’t even register it. “If I’d known you were going to cream your jeans about it, I wouldn’t have shown you,” he says. “Or at least I wouldn’t have let you sit in my seat.”

“I’ve never flown on a plane before!” Eddie says defensively. “It’s -- new!”

“Neither has Bev, and she didn’t get all gay about the view,” Richie points out.

“Bev, did you get gay about the view?” Eddie yells across the aisle.

“A little!” She calls back. “I barely cried, though!”

“ _ See?”  _ He hisses to Richie. “Bev  _ cried.  _ Why are you so jittery? Stop shaking your leg, you’re going to knee me in the face.”

“It’s not my fault your little head is so low to the ground,” Richie says, reaching to pinch Eddie, who smacks him away before he can reach his cheek. “And it’s because they don’t let you smoke on planes anymore; I regret to inform you that it is only going to get worse, my good sir.”

“Stop with the Voice, how are you shaking about that already?! We took off like two hours ago! Are you  _ that  _ addicted?! Rich, I’m serious, you need to quit before you --”

Richie waves him off. “Stop, stop. I’m fine. It’s just… knowing that it’s gonna be another eight hours.”

Stan returns from his prolonged mental-health bathroom break to find Eddie trying to wrestle a lit lighter out of Richie’s hand before he can touch it to one of the three cigarettes in his mouth. 

“Are we playing musical chairs?” he asks, lowering himself into what was originally Eddie’s seat without even touching on the open flame situation. 

“Tell Richie to stop trying to smoke on the plane!”

“Tell Eddie about grandfather clauses!”

“That doesn’t  _ apply  _ here, dick breath --”

The lighter whings by Stan’s hair as Richie pulls it out of Eddie’s reach.

“Would you look at that? I have to pee again!” Stan says, standing back up. The pleather under his ass didn’t even have time to get warm.

It’s a long flight.

The island, of course, is unfathomably beautiful. Eddie keeps his face pressed to the window the entire way down and only realizes after they’ve landed that he probably should have offered to let Stan and Richie look, too. It’s broad and green, like the back of a 

(turtle)

postcard for some tropical paradise. Richie says something about Lord of the Rings that Stan agrees with, but Eddie is too focused on picking out every individual Technicolor-green leaf on the trees they’re touching down among to hear it. 

The island looks old, the plants larger than anything he’s ever seen, but once they get off the plane, everything looks impossibly modern. Every surface is plastered with pictures of dinosaurs. There aren’t any of the actual animals, not yet, but a runner of nerves makes Eddie pull on the strap of his messenger bag, just so he can hold onto something.

The plane touched down on a private airstrip. It looked pretty much the same as the one at Bangor International. Everyone was shuttled through security -- it was weird, having to go through a metal detector just to get into a theme park -- and then the building spat them out in front of a huge set of gates. Like, thirty feet tall and plastered with signs about electrical shock danger.

Richie is bouncing like he’s gonna fly away. 

“Jesus Christ, Richard, just smoke,” Stan mutters under the sound of the tour guide who’s telling them all the rules that come with being in a park full of thirty-foot-tall lizards. Richie pulls out his lighter and a flattened pack and smokes up, but it does nothing to reduce his jitters. 

“Holy shit,” he breathes, knocking Stan with his hip. “I mean --  _ fuck.” _

“Really enjoying the gate?” Stanley asks, amused.

On those words, it opens. Eddie jumps a little. The only person who notices is Bev -- thank God -- and she widens her eyes at him, raising a knuckle to her mouth to bite it like she’ll squeal if she doesn’t stop herself. The crowd around them moves forward and they go with it.

The gates clang shut behind them.

Eddie should have expected how much safety shit they’d have to go through before touring a park full of  _ literal dinosaurs,  _ and honestly, he’s grateful for it, but by the time they finish getting the rundown, all they have time to do is get dinner and find their room. 

“Are we eating f-first or unpacking?” Bill asks as the bored-looking twentysomething who gave the safety spiel walks away. The ponytail sticking out of her baseball cap swishes back and forth. Eddie watches it and thinks about how much he’d like to be home right now.

The thought startles him so much he barely hears the rest of them voting on their course of action.  _ What the fuck?! What the fuck is wrong with him?  _ Of course he doesn’t want to go home! He’s in  _ Costa Rica!  _ Practically! With all his friends around him and the promise of seeing the incomprehensible tomorrow!

But he can’t deny that the thought was there. Just for a second, it was there.  _ How easy it would be to go back home and never see anything new. _

Fortunately, Eddie is fucking  _ fantastic  _ at pretending not to think or feel things he’s thinking or feeling. He presses the thought so far down he can almost believe it was never there and says, “I want to unpack first.”

The room is… small. It’s themed like the rest of the park, with plant-printed walls and a plastic canopy around the bed that makes it look like it’s a dino cave. Aside from the bed, there's a bureau in the main room; a little bathroom hides behind a door in the entry alcove. Bev immediately claims the bed. “How chivalrous of you all,” she says, flopping onto it. 

“No way,” Richie says. “That motherfucker is a queen. It can fit two people.” 

Looking extremely red, Ben mumbles something about not minding the floor. Bill echoes it, plus a few “muh”s before the  _ mind.  _

Richie produces three cigarettes and the butt from the one he smoked at the gate (“You didn’t get rid of it?! Do you collect them?!” “I couldn’t find a trash can and I don’t litter,  _ Eduardo.”)  _ and holds them in his fist, filter ends out. “Alright, we’re  _ trying  _ for the short straw here,” he says. Mike immediately pulls it. He pumps his fist and high-fives Bev. 

“You okay with that?” He asks her.

“Best-case scenario,” she says back. “Richie drools.”

“Hey!” Richie squawks.

“How do you know that?!” Bill and Eddie say together, and then make eye contact, both feeling seedy.

Bev sighs, looking downcast. “Prom night. Worst forty-five seconds of my life.”

“It wasn’t  _ forty-five seconds,”  _ Richie protests.

“Thirty,” Bev amends. 

“I was drunk!”

“I should hope so,” Bev says, trying not to laugh. “But I hope you learned your lesson about --”

“Who gets the couch?” Stan interjects. “Not that I don’t love to hear about my best friend’s misguided sexual encounters, but I’d really like to not sleep on the floor, if possible.”

“I’m too tall for the couch,” Richie says, a little too fast.

Bev coughs  _ ‘compensating’  _ and Mike stifles a laugh.

“In that case,” Stan says dryly. “Eddie?”

“You can have the couch. I don’t mind the floor.” Eddie eyes the floor, belatedly wondering what kind of primeval amoebas might be lurking there. 

“Hell yeah,” Richie says, holding up a hand for a high-five. His Eddie Voice has gotten better over the years (to the point where he can, and has, used it to get Eddie both into and out of detentions) but he still uses the squeaky Exaggerated Eddie Voice to say, “Fuck you, mom!” 

“Fuck  _ you,  _ Richie,” Eddie says, in his actual voice.

“On the  _ floor?!”  _ Richie gasps, widening his eyes in mock scandal. “Why, sir, I am a  _ lady!” _

“You know, sometimes I think the wrong member of this friend group is on meds,” Stan comments. “Are we going to eat?”

“I want waffles,” Bev calls from the bed, her voice muffled by the pillow. 

They end up all getting waffles. The waitress gives them a weird look for ordering four different types of waffle at five p.m., but also, she’s wearing a hat shaped like a T-rex head. And the waffles fuck super hard. 

“D’you think they’d let us order a… ‘Dino Sour’?” Richie reads off the drink menu, squinting over his glasses. “Oh my God, I love that. Like a whiskey sour. That’s awesome. I want to work here.”

“I was wondering how long it’d take us to get to ‘can I get away with ordering alcohol,’” Stan says.

“‘Long Island Iced Tea Rex!’” Richie looks like he’s going to tear up. “‘Winosaur Cooler!’ Stan! Stan, these are amazing! Stan!”

“There’s no  _ way  _ you’d pass for twenty-one,” Bev says, reaching around Ben to take a forkful of Richie’s strawberry sauce. “Mike, maybe.”

Mike looks pleased.

“Mike --” Richie starts.

“Nope,” Mike says.

In a performative snit, Richie leans back in his seat, arms crossed. “Eddie, go to the bathroom. You’re making the average age of this table look, like, eight years younger.”

“I do not look  _ ten!”  _ Eddie protests, and he’s glad that his voice doesn’t crack on the last word, because it was a near thing. He clears his throat, takes a sip of his water, and tries to sound like someone whose balls have dropped. “Anyway, I know the only thing you have in your backpack is mini Fireballs, so just call them ‘Velociraptor Shots’ or something and  _ don’t  _ pay ten dollars for shitty whiskey with green food coloring in it.”

“You brought F-f-f-fuh -- whiskey?” Bill asks. “You buh-been holding out on us, Trashmouth?”

Richie grins widely, flashing both rows of teeth. “Never.” 

So they go back up to their room and get plastered on Richie’s Fireball for free, until Mike starts singing  _ More Than a Feeling  _ with Ben and Bill doing the harmony and they get a noise complaint from their neighbors.

Eddie’s the first person to wake up. He knows it as soon as the spidery gray light of morning works his eyes open, even without checking that everyone is there. He can feel their presences in the room with him, all accounted for; their lucky chain of seven, whole and united.

Nah. He just knows the rest of them are lazy motherfuckers. 

It’s a good thing he was relegated to the floor, because he would have passed out on it last night anyway. His face is pressed into the nubby green carpeting. They forgot to ask for extra pillows. Instead of carpet shampoo, everything smells like AXE Dark Sexual Phoenix. It should smell like shit -- it  _ does  _ smell like shit; isn’t AXE a proven carcinogen? -- but he’s still half-asleep and he thinks  _ kind of hot though  _ before he can stop himself.

As he bleeds into consciousness, he realizes that someone has an arm around his waist.  _ Oh God oh fuck. Please be Bev. Please be Bev who just got really into shitty men’s cologne and didn’t tell any of us.  _ He tries to unhook himself without waking up the other person (who he’s still telling himself is Bev, even though they have a dark brown Bon Jovi haircut and are wearing a baja hoodie) and succeeds in kicking Mike, who’s lying on the floor next to him.

“I’m sorry!” He whispers. Mike doesn’t respond. Is Mike dead?

Richie’s arm is still dead weight around his waist. His fingers are locked around Eddie’s belt loops. Face burning, Eddie yanks his hand off (not bothering to try not to wake him up anymore) and steps fully on Mike’s stomach while he’s standing up.

“I’m sorry!” He cries again, and this time Mike kind of moves around, which is good, anyway. 

Bathroom.

He picks his way across the floor as quickly as he can without stepping on someone else. Before he gets to the entryway, he detours to grab a clean t-shirt and a toothbrush out of his backpack. 

The bathroom is decorated to look like the inside of another cave. Eddie kind of feels like he’s receding into the past, so it works on some metaphorical level, even if it is ugly as sin. Although, he feels less Cretaceous period and more eighth grade. That’s the last time he can remember feeling this panicked. 

(Jesus, what the fuck happened to him in eighth grade?)

“Eddie,” he says into the mirror, “You are acting like a clown right now.”

For some reason that just sends another wave of panic sweat prickling across his skin. (And that’s hyperhidrosis for sure; fuck you, Richie.) 

He doesn’t have a thing for Richie. He absolutely does not. And he doesn’t have a thing for AXE body spray. Because that would mean… actually, fuck a sexuality crisis. That would just be embarrassing.

But he doesn’t. He really doesn’t. He  _ can’t.  _

_ I’m not sick,  _ he thinks stubbornly, and the thought triggers a wave of hangover nausea that has him grabbing the sides of the sink like a man at sea.

He needs breakfast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i realize that he could have just brought a normal sized handle of fireball, but theres something about the aesthetic of those tiny ass mini bottles that you see in every gutter (or maybe thats just in new york?)
> 
> when doing my extensive research to make sure that this IT fanfiction about teenagers going to a park full of live dinosaurs in the 1990s is historically accurate i googled “when was axe invented” and forgot about the TOOL and google told me 6000 BC and i lost my shit  
> another fun fact: if you sling your arm over someone while youre sleeping its because you subconsciously want to protect them. i learned this on a family trip during which my brother made me google it because we were sharing a bed and i punched him in the face by accident every single night
> 
> anyway, as always, comment to give jeff bezos a bladder infection <3 1 comment = 1 billionaire who can’t pee


	3. teddie peanut butter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> consistent pov? isnt that an ariana grande song? i havent heard it  
> can you spot the shining reference in this chapter??
> 
> tell me if u see any typos!!

Mike wakes up while Eddie is shampooing out his shame. (Technically, he woke up when Eddie did the mashed potatoes all over his middle region, but he actually drags himself up off the floor when he hears the shower kick on in the bathroom.) He pulls himself hand-over-hand onto the cave-bed with Bev, the only person who managed to make it up there the night before. The frugal farmboy side of Mike is almost disappointed to see that no one took advantage of his passing out on the carpet. All that bed space! Real estate just going to waste! But then again, the only person that he’s over eighty percent sure isn’t currently harboring a crush on Beverly is in the bathroom right now, probably freaking out about whether he’s going to have an allergic reaction to the fragrance in the tiny hotel shampoos, so maybe it’s for the better. To keep himself from falling back into a sleep that he knows from experience will leave him groggier and more hungover than if he sticks out being awake, Mike sits up on the bed, planting his feet on the ground, and promises himself that when Eddie comes out of the bathroom he’ll go wash his face.

His head bobs a little. He shakes it out and stands up even though the showerhead is still blasting a snare line in the bathroom.

The flotsam of a good party is scattered over the floor: liquor bottles, a half-full container of Ocean Spray, Richie. When his space heater abandoned him, Richie rolled toward Bill, and the pair of them are clinging to each other like koalas, Bill with his head thrown back so he can keep drooling into the frankly impressive puddle he’s built up over the past eight hours. Ben is a short ways away, his tall, broad body made small by the way he’s curled in on himself. The sight makes Mike sad for some reason. Above it all, Stan is on the couch, laid out primly with his hands clasped over the spare blanket, sleeping off his sensible one drink. A slight grin returns to Mike’s face. God, he’s going to miss his Losers when they leave.

The smile leaves him again. He still hasn’t talked to them about his decision to stay in --

His brain stutters. Bill once told them that he didn’t stutter in his brain, only aloud, but apparently that isn’t universal, because Mike’s brain definitely catches, like there’s a scratch on the place in some mental CD where it says D-D-D-D-

_ Derry. _

He still hasn’t talked to them about his decision to stay in  _ Derry.  _

That was weird.  
He rubs his arms, dispelling the unpleasant feeling that settled over him when his mind skipped. (But that isn’t quite true, was it? It wasn’t when he forgot. It was when he remembered.) Before he can think about it too much, before he can dig up the memory that’s lurking just below the surface of his mind, he dips forward and picks up one of the Fireball bottles, turning smoothly to throw it into the plastic trash can with a flick of his wrist.

The water pressure in the hotel is actually decent, and Eddie feels that his gratitude for this fact is more than sufficient to make up for anything he has to make up for, cosmically speaking. The complimentary shampoo is garbage -- do these people not understand that they don’t have to put green dye in  _ everything?! --  _ but it gets him clean. He shuts off the spray just as Mike is pitching the last bit of party detritus and reemerges, damp and dressed, into the main room to see Mike debating himself over going back to sleep.

“Mike!” He says, almost surprised. He can hear the guilt on his own voice and recoils from it.  _ You don’t have anything to be guilty about. You literally did nothing. So you fell asleep with one of your oldest friends. Big deal! You do it all the time.  _

_ So you wondered, for a second, about what it might be like if it was under different circumstances. And so you felt a little invasive about it! Of course you did. Because you  _ know  _ he’d never wonder the same thing. But you just  _ wondered.  _ And it was just for a second.  _

_ And the entire time you were brushing your teeth. _

He resolutely had  _ not  _ thought about it in the shower, though. Because that really  _ would  _ have been invasive. 

Eddie always kind of feels like an asshole when he has a crush on someone. It isn’t a feeling he even lets himself acknowledge very often. He’d allowed himself to think he had a crush on Bev when she’d first joined their little group, only because everyone else did and the unanimity of being one of six made him feel a little better about the whole thing. But whenever he has feelings for someone else that he knows they don’t reciprocate (any kind of feelings, other than spite) it makes him feel like the aunt at family reunions who kisses you on the lips instead of just hugging you like a normal fucking person.

Not that he has a crush on -- Jesus.

“You cleaned up,” he says to Mike. 

Mike nods, raising and dipping one shoulder and making shrugging look cool and effortless. Which, Eddie supposes, is what a shrug is supposed to be. But he’s never managed to master the art of making  _ anything  _ look cool and/or low-effort. He just spent twenty minutes trying not to overthink about  _ sleeping,  _ for fuck’s sake. 

“Needed something to keep me awake,” Mike whispers. “You want to get breakfast?”

“ _ Yes,”  _ Eddie says. “ _ Please. _ ”

“They better have something other than waffles,” Mike says as they jog down the stairs. Too awkward to insist on walking instead of taking the elevator, Eddie had sort of steered them toward the stairwell, and Mike had, thankfully, gone with it. Even though Eddie isn’t sure how track works in college, if he’ll even be able to run for NYU, he wants to stay in shape. He likes the feeling of his lungs filling as he pushes himself just enough to notice them in a good way. 

The carpet in the hallway and on the staircase is dark blue, woven with a twisting black jungle of vines and bird shapes, the relief done in a dizzy shade of sky. Eddie can’t tell what the birds are supposed to be. If Stan was there, he might know. He makes a mental note to ask him when the rest of the Losers come puttering down for breakfast, as he knows they will.

“I may never be able to eat waffles again,” Eddie agrees.

“At least you didn’t eat an entire can of whipped cream. I still feel a little nauseous,” Mike admits.

“Or try to do whip-its,” Eddie adds.

“Yeah, I’d do just about anything for Bill, but whip-its in a restaurant for children is not one of those things.” The mirth in Mike’s voice belies his fondness.

Eddie falls silent, marvelling at how squarely you’d have to fall in the overlap of the Venn diagram between ‘self-assured’ and ‘stupid’ to do whip-its in a public eating space. Only Richie had taken up Bill on his dare last night. Even Ben, usually so gung-ho, decided not to follow their fearless leader on that one. 

It doesn’t feel awkward, jogging down the stairs with only the sound of their sneakers hitting carpet to echo off the backroom-gray walls. Mike has that effect on him, Eddie’s noticed. When he’s around Bill or Richie or Bev, the desire to say something cool -- something that will get him the stamp of approval he knows he’s already earned -- keeps him talking nonstop; when he’s around Ben or Stan he feels like he needs to make up for their natural quietude by filling up the empty space with his own stream of dialogue. Not in an uncomfortable way, not in either case. It’s not bad. It’s not forced. He’s still Eddie, just a talkative Eddie. When he’s around Mike, he lapses into this pleasant mutual silence more often than he does with anyone else. As much as he loves mouthing off, it’s a nice change of pace to think his thinks for a while. It reminds him of going out to the trainyard as a little kid. Just being with himself. Only without the achy tinge of loneliness that underrode those times at the train tracks -- it wasn’t the being alone that he didn’t like back then, it was the knowledge that he didn’t have the choice to end the solitude when he wanted to. Now that he has six, count them,  _ six  _ people who’ve chosen him as their own, and self-reflection is something of a rarity, he appreciates his time with Mike even more.

Although. Self-reflection can be dangerous.

Eddie hits the bottom of the staircase first and motors on, giving the exit door an extra push as he passes through so it’ll stay open long enough for Mike to follow him. The stairs give way to another hall of numbered rooms, but he knows that if he follows it down and makes a left he should be at the back entrance to the dining area. Without meaning to, he’s half-running, his feet trying subconsciously to keep up with the snowballing thoughts in his head. 

Of course he runs into someone.

They both start to fall, and he grabs her forearms to steady her, doing a rom-com-worthy little shuffle-spin to keep them both upright. Behind him, he can feel Mike stop just in time to not bring them all down.

“I’m sorry!” Eddie yelps, his hands still around the stranger’s elbows. 

She pats his arms, and he lets her go. “It’s fine!” She reassures him. “I wasn’t looking where I was going. I’ve been way too excited ever since I got here.” She grins like they’re in on something together. Eddie smiles back uncertainly. She’s short, even shorter than he is, which is one of Eddie’s favorite traits in a person. Her hair is brown and curly, tied down in a long low ponytail with enough escaped pieces around her face that, with her large, sparkly eyes and spangled purple eyeshadow, she looks like a character from an anime. 

“Yeah, it’s… exciting,” he says stiffly, telepathically begging Mike to step in and say something.

“I’m Patricia,” she says, extending one arm like they’re in a business meeting. He’s too close to really do the same, so he has to bend one arm awkwardly close to his body to shake her hand unless he wants to step back into Mike. 

“Eddie,” he says. “Eddie Kaspbrak. This is Mike.”

Mike raises one hand in a wave. “Hey, Patricia.”

“Hello, Mike!” She giggles. “Well, I’d better go. I’m here with my cousin and she’s waiting for me upstairs. Maybe I’ll see you around!” She waves again as she’s pattering off, running on the toes of her ballet flats, and Mike lets out a little laugh.

“What?” Eddie asks, already back on track towards the dining room. He can smell cinnamon and cheap hot syrup around the corner. Suddenly he realizes how hungry he is.

“I feel like I just met an anime protagonist,” Mike says. They’ve all watched at least one episode of at least one anime at Richie’s behest.

“Yeah, she was a lot,” Eddie agrees, flagging down a harried-looking hostess. 

“Not us.”

“Oh, no. Our friend group is completely manageable,” Eddie agrees, just in time for Richie and Bev to appear in the front dining room entrance and start yelling across the room at them. The word ‘fuck’ is used five times before Mike quiets them down.

They all finish eating at different times, since they trickled down more or less in pairs. Richie brought down an entire glass jar of Teddie peanut butter that he ate half of with a spoon before Ben cut him off. By the time Stan has finished cutting tidy bites off of his French toast sticks with the side of a fork, Richie is bouncing in his seat so hard that he knocks over the pitcher of syrup. Ben’s hand darts out to catch it. He succeeds, but also knocks over a half-empty juice glass, which Mike isn’t quick enough to stop; most of the orange juice heads for Bev’s seat. She leaps out of it. 

“Jesus Christ. Alright. We’re going. I’m sorry, Stan. I can’t do this.” Bev adopts the voice of someone talking to a small and rambunctious puppy. “Richie, let’s go look at fossils.”

There’s a huge display of fossils and scientific what-have-you in the cavernous front foyer of the building just inside the park entrance. Eddie isn’t sure what the building is called officially, but it’s where you buy day passes and get your little ‘I-got-the-safety-talk’ badge. It’s a short walk away from the hotel, attached to a second, larger dining hall and kitchen. He only peeked inside the dining area while they were getting the welcome tour, but it looked fancy, like somewhere you could hold a wedding, with thick red carpeting and wood-paneled walls; nothing like the dinosaur-themed Applebee’s they’ve been frequenting. 

“Actually,” Bill says, giving up on his attempt to stop the juice with paper napkins before it reaches the edge of the table. “We should probably split up, right? I mean, organizing seven people seems like it’ll be kind of insane.”

“You’ve never had trouble before,” Stan points out, after chewing and swallowing his bite of toast.

“I’ve never had Richie around dinosaurs before,” Bill says wryly, smiling nonetheless. Richie, enjoying being the center of attention, smiles humbly and shrugs, almost knocking over another pitcher. 

“Are we doing pairs for the day?” Bev asks. “Because in that case, I want to go with --”

“I want Eddie,” everyone says in unison. Richie, who’s the closest to him, grabs his arm. Not enjoying being the center of attention, Eddie flushes.

“Why does everyone want to be with me so bad?!”

“Where’s the aviary?” Stan asks.

“Around the Triceratops Run and past the -- oh. I see how it is. You’re exploiting me.”

“Well,  _ I  _ don’t want to have to walk around reading a map all day,” Stan says, unashamed. “But if you could just tell me where the aviary is again I can write it down and you can go with someone else. That’s really the only place I need to be able to find.”

“You’re going to look at birds  _ all day?”  _ Ben asks. 

“I guess I won’t be going with Ben, then,” Stan says, unaffected.

“I’ll go with you, Ben,” Beverly says kindly, and Ben turns as red as his cranberry juice, which he lifts to his mouth and pounds to avoid responding.

The remaining three losers still have their sights locked on Eddie. 

“He’s mine,” Richie says, tightening his hold on Eddie’s sleeve. “You motherfuckers can go find yourselves a directory.”

“Thanks a lot,” Eddie says again, trying to sound irritated but almost as red as Ben.

They end up dividing like this: Ben and Bev, Richie and Eddie, and Mike, Stan, and Bill as a group of three with plans (made while Stan was in the bathroom) to peel away from the aviary after an hour or so. If anyone can get Stan away from his birds, it’s Bill.

While the Losers Club is deciding where to meet at the end of the day (while Bill is trying to get them all to sit still long enough to get a sentence out), four miles away, a red light flickers on in the main security hub. It’s not an emergency alert -- far from it. The US military operates on a DEFCON system: levels five through one, each number signifying a step closer to nuclear armageddon. The security hub on Isla Nublar has a similar alert system, with five levels, from ‘be on watch’ to ‘nuke the island’. It’s a little more complex than that, but the island’s head security officer, Jim Boutcher, breaks it down that way for the newbies. And everyone is a newbie -- this entire production is completely unprecedented. A godlike miracle of modern science. That’s why the red light above the security cam switcher doesn’t even take them to DEFCON five. Before they even get to that point, there are a hundred levels of reminders and be-careful alerts and heads-up alarms. The light that blinks on while Bev is using her elbows to hold Richie to his chair so he hears what Bill is saying about coming back to the hotel in time for dinner is just a letting-you-know light, a friendly reminder of something that shouldn’t matter at all. A tropical storm is blowing west from Costa Rica.

Nothing to worry about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> looked up ocean spray to make sure the only juice they sell is cranberry and ended up on their twitter and let me just say………... no more brands. society has progressed past the need for brands  
> also.. [i miss kurt cobain vine voice] i miss….. teddie peanut butter…. so much.. im on the west coast w my parents for the holidays and here they have adams and it does NOT compare
> 
> leave a comment to give me serotonin!! 1 comment = 1 molecule  
> also you can now unfortunately follow me on tumblr @cranberryofficial!!! pls do, i need friends


	4. ayuh, castle rock, & typing out a maine accent phonetically

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wrote most of this at 11 am after doing three shots of vodka so…….. in the spirit of the source material, i guess? but apologies in advance that the quality is… Like That  
> mainly for all the adverbs that i was too lazy to edit out  
> also had a fun time delving down a rabbithole of 1990s comedians trying to find a good ’93 equivalent for jimmy fallon since he was, apparently, in jurassic world

They take a helicopter to the other side of the island, because Richie wants to see the T-Rex.

“You know that’s where everyone’s going to be going, right?” Eddie points out as they walk to the landing pad.

“Um, yeah. Because it’s a  _ T-Rex,”  _ Richie counters, and even Eddie can’t argue with that.

The helicopter pilot is a burly man with a faded baseball cap and an accent that Eddie doesn’t notice until halfway through the flight because it matches his own.

“You’re from Maine!” He gasps aloud, cutting off the pilot’s narration about the foliage they’re flying over. The trees are pretty spectacular -- a shade of lime Eddie has only seen matched in the hotel shampoo, with broad, flat leaves that he can make out even from however-many-thousand feet up.  _ Everything  _ is bigger on the island. More oxygen, or something. The tour guide they’d met when they got off the plane had explained it to them, but Eddie had been only half-listening. He, for one, is appreciating the extra oxygen. He hasn’t had trouble breathing once since they left Derry, not even when he had his mini anxiety attack after waking up this morning. 

His face has been pressed to the window since takeoff, appreciating the super-oxygenated Jurassic trees. Beside him, Richie is doing his best not to lose his breakfast.

“Ayuh,” the pilot says indulgently. Or maybe he’s really just  _ that  _ from Maine. “Born and raised.”

Getting way too excited for someone who sees people from Maine literally every single day because he never leaves it, Eddie asks, “Whereabouts?”

“Little city east of Castle Rock,” The pilot says. He flips a switch and makes a maneuver that colors Richie the same shade as the leaves below. 

An emotion Eddie can only describe as  _ I know that place!!  _ trills through his blood. “Me too!” He says, digging an elbow into Richie’s side.  _ Get a load of this! Can you believe?  _ “Well, a ways east, but I know where Castle Rock is. This is my first time outside of Maine.”

Richie holds up the hand that isn’t locked around his stomach in a thumbs-up.  _ Yep, he’s from Maine too, cool. _ Eddie digs busily through his backpack and pulls out a Chapstick-sized tube of Dramamine, which he passes to Richie.

“First time. Fuckin’ shame,” the pilot says, “And pardon my French if you’re a religious man.”

“I’m not,” Eddie says, wondering if it’s true. Not too religious to say fuck, anyway. “I don’t mind Maine, though.”

“Boy your age should be getting away from home,” the pilot says sagely. “How old are you? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

Richie snickers, and with another (much sharper) elbow to the chest, Eddie snatches back his Dramamine. “Eighteen,” he corrects the pilot.

“And you’ve never gone to fuckin’ Boston?” The pilot asks incredulously. “Pardon my French if you’re a religious man.” He says never like  _ nevah.  _ Eddie’s excitement takes on a different tint, tingeing shameful and crawly with something inarticulable. This guy is seriously invasive, and also, not everyone can afford to go to Boston! What if Eddie was super poor?! Okay, so he’s at a multimillion-dollar theme park. But he’s there on a scholarship! The pilot doesn’t know his story!

“Pardoned,” Eddie says coldly. He tries to keep his stiff tone as he speaks, but his embarrassment (and extensive conditioning to treat his elders with respect) slips through as he continues. “I’ve been to Boston, I think. Probably. I just… don’t remember. I was pretty young.”

“We went to Bangor one time,” Richie chips in, sounding queasy. The Dramamine is starting to do its thing, though.

“Bangor is in Maine, dipshit,” Eddie hisses.

“Yeah, but that’s, like, ‘away from home’,” Richie says, drawing quotes around the last three words for the pilot’s benefit.

Eddie’s wounded pride must show, even through the pilot’s Maine-snowfall-thick layer of New England brusqueness, because he says, not unkindly, “Well, it’s none of my business, I suppose. But I hate to see kids never gettin’ out of dodge. ’Specially up in Maine.” He laughs, a loud, phlegmy cackle that goes on for a long time; long enough for Eddie to start thinking about aerosols and pathogen transmission and to squash the thought (which is spoken in a voice not his own, but female and wheedling) back down. “There’s a whole world out there,” the pilot says, then falls silent.

Eddie stares out the window, the one across the ’copter. He can see the ocean on that side, now that he’s not looking straight down.

_ There’s a whole world out there. _

Off the coast of the island, the storm picks up.

The red light, the one in the security hub, turns off. In its place, the blue  _ five  _ on the DEFCON scale turns on.

Stan Uris is having the time of his life at the aviary. 

It’s shaped like an enormous glass gumdrop, reinforced with curved metal beams; the visitors stand inside the gumdrop with the smaller birds, and the really huge, really dangerous birds live outside, in another, larger enclosure. If Stan squints, he can see the wire mesh that keeps them in, a hundred meters up. From this far away, it looks filament-thin. 

By nature, Stan trusts authority. He believes that the park has taken all the right precautions, and that the wire will be enough to keep the birds in. And inside the gumdrop, he knows he’s safe. The glass is thick, you can tell just by touching it, which was the first thing he did while Bill and Mike wandered off to go not appreciate the birds properly. Once he’s reassured himself that there’s little to no danger of being scooped up by a hungry  _ teratorn gigantis, _ he sets about collecting birds in his bird notebook. None of the ones on the island are in his Sibley’s, so he has to expand into the back section of the softcover. There’s a chapter of blank pages for the novice ornithologist to record his findings in, and Stan begins to replicate the Sibley’s summaries of each bird for the jurassic ones, complete with a little sketch. He wishes Bev were there. She’s a better artist, and she’d be happy to help him out. But she’s busy trying to get Ben to finally make a move, so he has to do the best he can himself. Most of his birds end up looking like Peeps with long skinny legs, but he labels the important parts. It’s not like he’ll need to use the guide to identify them once he leaves the island, anyway; these birds will never be anywhere but inside their little wire enclosure. Cage, really, is what it is. It makes Stan a little sad.

“They’re pretty, aren’t they?” 

It’s a girl’s voice, perky. For a second Stan thinks it’s Bev, just because ninety percent of the times that a women under sixty speaks to him it’s Bev, but it’s not her cigarette-smoky Yankee accent. This girl’s voice is high and sweet and just a little Southern.

He turns away from the sky. It’s not Bev, it’s… well, it’s the prettiest girl he’s ever seen. She looks like Richie’s little sister’s Barbie dolls, not because she’s tall or busty or blonde (she’s none of these things) but because she’s wearing a lavender purple denim jacket and sparkly purple eyeshadow, and her curly hair is full of rainbow plastic butterfly clips. Underneath the jacket she has on a sundress and jelly sandals. 

“Yeah,” he says, and he can  _ tell  _ he sounds stupid as fuck; he sounds the way Richie sounds when Eddie asks if he  _ got that, dipshit? Were you listening?  _ after he finishes rattling off some TED Talk about health/cars/lawbreaking/other. The way that Stan then makes fun of as soon as they’re alone. Well, Richie isn’t here. His instant whippedness goes undocumented. “They’re -- do you birdwatch?” Good fucking job, Stan. This is why the only women who speak to you are septuagenarians. He pulls himself together, something he’s good at doing. He’s been told that he talks to people like he’s giving a business presentation. That he can do. Professional. Crisp -- 

He missed her entire response.

“I’m sorry?” He asks politely, kicking himself.

She doesn’t seem bothered. Her pink-lipglossed smile is wide and shiny. “I don’t know the breeds of bird, but I like to look at them. They’re kind of calming, you know? Like, when the world is too much, there’s always birds.” It’s about eighteen layers more personal than anything Stan would say, even to the Losers, but she’s totally unabashed.

“And they can’t talk,” he says seriously. Her eyes widen and he realizes a second too late that she thinks he’s making a jab at her coming over and talking to him. “Sorry,” he amends hastily. “I don’t mean you. My friends are… something else. By which I mean…  _ so loud.” _

“Oh, I know!” She pipes. “I ran into a couple of them this morning. Eddie and… Mark?”

“Mike,” Stan says, wondering how she knows he knows them. Did they mention him? God forbid. “You got one of the quiet ones.”

She giggles. “They were nice! And I saw you guys at breakfast. You all just seemed so happy with each other, and I was like,  _ I’m going to become friends with them.  _ So when I saw you here I thought I’d come over and say hi.”

“Hi,” Stan says.

She giggles again. “Hi. Oh! Look at that!” She grabs his shoulder and points to a bird that’s flapped up close to them on the other side of the glass. “Do you know what he’s called?”

“That’s an Archaeopteryx. I think.” He flips through his notes. “My drawings aren’t very good,” he says by way of apology.

“I could help you! I like to draw!” She takes the book and the pencil from him before he can stop her and flips to a fresh page. “You tell me what I’m drawing and I’ll make it happen.”

“Alright then,” he says.

They make it through a few more birds (her drawings are  _ much  _ better than his) before they bump into Bill and Mike messing around with the stationary binoculars. 

“Oh, look,” he says to Patty in a low voice, like a documentarian trying not to disturb wildlife. He puts an arm around her and pulls her closer so they can crouch behind an imaginary bush. She plays along, looking to him and then following his gaze, bringing the eraser of her (his) pencil to her mouth and biting it thoughtfully. “A pair of wild idiots,” he finishes. “Fancy meeting you here,” he says to the idiots, letting go of Patty and taking the binoculars next to them so he can get a better look into the outer enclosure. 

“Do I know you?” Mike asks.

“My name’s Patty,” Patty says, holding a bracelet-covered arm out.  
“Ah. Well, it’s very lovely to re-meet you, Patty, but for the record, I was talking to this asshole. I would greet you much more politely.”

“You used to be so nice, Mike. We ruined you,” Stan says, still at the binoculars. They’re pointed out too far, clear through the other side of the enclosure, aimed at something gray. He twirls the dial. A cloud. A lot of clouds, actually. He pulls back, affronted. From where he stands, the sky looks as clear as a baby’s complexion, blue as anything with barely a cloud to cast a shadow. But there -- on the horizon. He presses his eyes back to the binoculars. “There’s a storm coming,” he realizes.

“A storm?” Mike looks into his own binoculars, fiddling with the focus. “Damn, you’re right. That doesn’t look too good.”

“Let me look,” Bill says, popping around from the wrong side of the lenses, where he’d been making stupid faces for Mike to zoom in on. He squints at the stormheads for a second and then pulls back, looking alert in a way Stan hasn’t seen in years, drawn tight like a bowstring, his chin raised to look out at the innocuous clouds with a spark in his eyes and his nostrils flared. “We have to go back to the hotel,” he says.

“What?” Stan asks.

Patty looks between the three of them, alarmed.

“Bill, I think --” Mike begins.

Bill shakes his head. “No. Something is wrong. There’s something…” He blinks scuzzily, like he’s shaking off a hangover. “I don’t… we have to go back. We have to find everyone else.”

“It’s barely even cloudy,” Stan says, looking back out to the clouds to make sure he hasn’t missed something. 

“Listen to me,” Bill says, in the voice that made them all go,  _ oh, yeah, that’s Big Bill Denbrough; that’s why we say how high when he says jump.  _ “Something bad is going to happen. I can  _ feel  _ it. We need to find everyone else.”

“Okay,” Mike says

And when he looks to Stan, Stan echoes, “Okay.”

Patty fiddles with Stan’s pencil. “Should I go?”

Bill shakes his head. “No. You should come with us. I mean -- you can if you want to, but I think you should go back to the hotel.”

“I’ll stay with you,” Patty says. “You seem like you know what you’re doing.”

Mike smiles. “He does.”

The storm creeps closer. 

It hits at 1:13 p.m.

“Jesus,” Eddie says, wrinkling his nose. He grabbed a shiny paper map from the hotel when they left, even though he knew they wouldn’t need it, just to be safe, and he’s glad he did; he holds it above his head to block some of the rain that’s bucketing down. “Where the fuck did this come from?”

“The sky.” Richie grins, his teeth full of corn dog. Eddie makes a face at him. Richie bites off the last chunk of his corndog, throws the stick into a plaster, egg-shaped trash can, and swipes the map with his greasy hands. Eddie makes a noise of protest. “What, you’re just gonna let me get rained on?” Richie asks.

“I wasn’t sure if it was raining up where you are,” Eddie snaps obligingly. Richie whoops and unfolds the map over the both of them. Now Eddie’s getting poured on again; the rain is blowing sideways. With the map more than an inch above his head it blows into the gap and fingers warmly down his back. 

“It is,” Richie says, when he’s done with his performative delight. “Like a bitch. Should we just go back to the hotel?”

“I’m allergic to peanuts and cherries, not mud,” Eddie says.

“Poor Stan.” Richie shakes his head sadly. “I’m sure  _ his  _ allergies are really flaring up right about now. Are you really allergic to peanuts?”

“Fifty-fifty chance.” Eddie avoids eye contact, knowing that Richie will know what that means, which is  _ the doctors said no, but my mom is really sure, and she must know  _ something  _ they don’t. _

“Hmm. Okay. Well, since we’re not Stan and not allergic to a little dirt, what say we hit up the dilfosaurus?” 

“Dilophosaurus.”

“Dilf… osaur.”

“Is it out of your system?”

“It’s outta my system,” Richie confirms. “But, seriously, anything where there isn’t a line. Waiting in line for two hours to be told that the T-Rex wasn’t there ’cause it was ‘sleeping’ was some bullshit.”

It had actually been closer to forty minutes, but with Richie bouncing off the metaphorical fucking walls, it had felt like two hours to Eddie too, even without the undiagnosed ADHD.

It’s a medium walk to the dilophosaurus pen, which Eddie doesn’t mind. They’re gonna be stuck in the rain either way, even if they just go next door to the triceratops. All the enclosures are open-topped, and the pathways between them, like wider versions of zoo walkways, are fully outside anyway. They may as well burn off some of Richie’s standing-in-line energy by walking. 

Feeling drippy and ratlike, Eddie heads the way toward the velociraptors. 

“Where’d everyone go?” He asks aloud, scrunching his face up again.

“Inside,” Richie suggests. “Pussies.”

“I think a lot of the people here have small children.”

“Well, you have me, and you’re still out here.” Richie punctuates this by shaking water out of his hair, spraying it everywhere.

“Fuck this.” Eddie starts to jog, leaving the slight shelter of the island map. 

“Oh, come on! Eds! I was just fuckng with you!” Richie calls.

“I’m not leaving!” Eddie points ahead of himself, and Richie clues in, falling into step beside him a moment later.

“Genius brain,” he says.

They slog through the sodden short grass of the walkway up to the gyrosphere holders. They look like bike racks, but instead of Schwinns, they hold massive glass hamster balls. Richie marches up to one and stands arms akimbo like a suburban dad, surveying the release switch. Eddie peers around his side. Attached to the metal pole where the gyrosphere is locked into it is a plastic scanner, the kind you’d see at a grocery store register for credit cards.

“Swipe the pass,” he says.

Leaning forward so he won’t have to unhook the lanyard from his neck, Richie swipes their plastic park pass. The scanner lights up green and the plastic claws holding the gyrosphere in place open, releasing it. A glass door, flush with the front side of the sphere, opens with a mechanical hiss. 

“Aftah you, sir,” Richie says in a British Butler Voice. Eddie clambers gracelessly in, Richie follows, and the glass seals behind them. “Alright.” Richie rubs his hands together. “How’s this thing work?”

“Buckle in,” Eddie says. 

Richie makes a show of complying. When they’re both buckled, a screen flickers to life. It’s small, the size of a portable television, placed so that the gyrosphere’s riders have convenient viewing. Adam Sandler is grinning from the middle of the screen.

“Is that… Adam Sandler?” Richie asks.

“The guy from SNL?”

Eddie has seen enough episodes of SNL in Richie’s basement, putting up with the mediocre skits to have Richie elbow him every time there’s a joke he wants to make sure Eddie’s heard, to be pretty sure that it’s the guy from SNL.

Adam Sandler explains how the gyrosphere works and that it can go up to five miles an hour (“Good thing you had us buckle in, then,”) and what to do to be safe while they’re driving it. Eddie listens intently.

“Got all that safety knowledge, Doctor K?”

“Shut up,” Eddie says, without much heart. He’s still listening to Adam Sandler. “These things are so interesting. How do they move?! They don’t --” He’s too excited to articulate the rest of his sentence, so he cranes his neck around, bopping in his seat a little as he tries to get a good look at the mechanics of the gyrosphere. 

Richie watches fondly for a moment, then cuts in. “We gonna go?”

“Yeah. Yes. I -- am driving.” 

Richie removes his hand from the lever between them. “You’re driving.”

Back at the hotel, Bev is trying not to panic. An alert went out over the hotel speakers, the ones that had been piping muzak into the lobby: nothing to worry about, but could everyone please make sure to stay inside for a few hours? Just until the rain passed. Only there was a funny little electrical disturbance that had rode in on the rainclouds, nothing at all to stress over, just -- stay inside, please. 

She and Ben had actually been having a very pleasant time inside, thank you very much, after they’d visited a couple of the exhibits and Bev had begged off for the rain. 

“Warm me up, Ben,” she’d said, clinging to his arm, laying it on thick, and he’d finally,  _ finally  _ clued in. And then this stupid announcement had come on and ruined everything.

Now they’re back in the hotel lobby, and Bev is pacing. Ben watches, hovery somehow despite his height and his girth and his manly-man lumberjack look, and comforting somehow despite the hovering. She stops pacing to look at him. 

“We have to go out there and get them,” she says, gearing up to explain that even though the announcer lady had said in her calm sterile voice that nothing was wrong, and even though it  _ was  _ just a little rainstorm, she can feel that something is off, but Ben nods before she can continue.

“I agree,” he says. “Something feels…”

“Off,” she finishes. “Something terrible is going to happen.”

There’s a tear in the fence. Clean through the stump-thick metal poles of the enclosure and just wider than the gyrosphere. Looking at it makes Eddie feel cold. That is not supposed to be there. If there’s a hole in the fence, that means that the dinosaur(s) that were inside it can now be outside it, and judging by the thickness of the fence, they do not want the dinosaurs to be outside it. He stops rolling without realizing it. The stillness draws Richie’s attention, and he turns to Eddie.   
“Everything okay, Eds?”

“There’s a hole in the fence,” Eddie says.

“S’probably just for effect,” Richie says, waving a hand. “Everything looks like it got fucked up by a dinosaur, it’s all part of the  _ aes-thet-ique.”  _ (This last he says in a French accent.) “Like the shirts in the gift shop with the claw rips and the fake blood splatters.”

“Oh,” Eddie says. “Yeah.”

He looks at the hole, and then back at Richie. 

Richie’s eyebrows are raised. “So?” he asks. “What d’you say to a little off-roading?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> remember to comment to end sexism <3 (and to save me from my home for the holidays insanity/crippling covid loneliness)  
> even if ur comment is just "you switched tenses you dumb motherfucker" it will make my day
> 
> and/or: talk to me on tumblr!! @cranberryofficial


	5. wicked

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry that it’s been so long since the last update. i lost my mojo for a while and i didn’t want to shit a chapter out just to shit one out. i directly robbed eddies dialogue from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXoxXFNRrCc. also most of the gyrosphere scene. am i the only person who likes jurassic world as much as jurassic park????

The enclosure turns into a jungle a dozen feet in. It’s dark and choked with plant life: dark vines, so shadowed they’re almost teal, slap against the front of the gyrosphere like the scrubbers in some ancient, mud-stinking car wash, and the wet light that filters down on them dapples the ground with freckles. Eddie hadn’t been having any trouble guiding the gyrosphere along the wide grass paths -- it’s not a car, that’s for sure, but it’s designed to be easy to drive -- but they hit a patch of mud inside the enclosure and it starts to whine, slipping against the forest floor. The ground is lumpy, like it’s been trampled by a herd of something small-footed, and slimy; the mud leaves smeary tracks on the clear sides of the gyrosphere as they slip upwards, trying for purchase.

Richie leers at him. “Gross. Skidmarks.”

“Shut up,” Eddie says without energy. “Are you sure that hole was supposed to be there?”

“You think one of these motherfuckers just ripped through two feet of electrified steel?” Richie asks by way of answer. Eddie isn’t sure exactly who  _ these motherfuckers  _ are. Why didn’t they stop to check and see what the fuck they were getting into before they went charging in?!

“No… but that doesn’t mean it was meant for  _ us  _ to go through… it could just be for the dinosaurs to come out into the area where we were, couldn’t it?” Eddie asks.

“Stop  _ worrying,  _ Special K,” Richie says, punching him in the shoulder. “Look, if anything tries to eat us, I’ll protect you, alright?”

“I can protect myself!”

“Yeah, I know you can.” Richie looks fond. “You gonna drive or should I?”

“I can drive,” Eddie snaps. He leans his full weight on the handle, trying to force the gyrosphere forward. It spins fruitlessly and finally finds traction, shooting forward through the muck and spitting out a wake of twigs and greenish muck. 

“So you can.” Richie leans back in his chair.

Eddie lasts all of fourteen seconds before he speaks up again. “This is a bad idea.”

“It’s a  _ great  _ idea,” Richie says, although it sounds -- to Eddie, at least, and he’s gotten pretty good at reading Richie Tozier, if he might say so himself -- like Richie has finally started to realize that this might not be the smartest thing they’ve ever done.

“No! No it’s not!” Eddie says, even though he’s still driving deeper into the jungle. Fucking Richie. Eddie can remember a time, not so long ago, where he would have stepped off a cliff if Bill had suggested in passing that it might be a good move. When had that power transferred over to Richie? 

And why can’t Eddie just make his own fucking decisions? When will he stop fucking jumping when people tell him to? Bill, Richie. His mother. What difference does it make, if it isn’t him who’s making the decision to go forward?

It’s as he toggles the lever to unstick them from another patch of deep mud that he realizes he  _ does  _ want to do this. Despite all his protests and the warble of fear under his skin. So maybe that’s the difference: Richie, the fucker, tells Eddie what to do as much as he breathes, but when has he ever expected Eddie to actually do something Eddie didn’t want to?

So maybe Eddie does want to do this. Maybe that’s the difference. Because for Richie -- and for Bill, while he’s thinking about it -- he wants to be stronger. Better.

Braver.

He really wants to.

And maybe that _ is  _ making his own decision, in a way. 

But he’s still going to bitch about it. So he says, again, “No. No. We’re gonna get arrested, they’re gonna shave our heads, and we’re gonna have to make wine in the toilet.”

“We’d better not get sent to prison,” Richie says. The laugh he’s holding back is audible in his voice. “You wouldn’t last fifteen seconds with a face like that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? What’s that supposed to fucking me -- holy shit.”

_ “Wicked,”  _ Richie breathes.

In front of them is a dinosaur. Four dinosaurs. Eddie doesn’t know the breeds of dinosaur, but they’re big, and scaly, and real, and  _ there,  _ right  _ there,  _ in front of them, in front of Richie Tozier and Eddie Kaspbrak from Derry, Maine, live and breathing and _ eating leaves  _ off the jungle floor in  _ nineteen-ninety-fucking-four.  _

“Four dinosaurs,” Richie says, gesturing broadly. “For your viewing pleasure.”

“Five,” Eddie corrects him. The fear under his skin threatens to explode out. Because something is terribly wrong.

Richie pushes his glasses up on his nose and squints, recounting. “Listen, Eds, I know you never miss the opportunity to prove me wrong, but I’m not seein’ five. I could just be really hungover, but I’d like to think that I can still count to  _ four  _ even if I’m not at peak performance.” He points to the dinosaurs as he counts them. “One, two, three, four. Who am I missing.”

Eddie’s hands are shaking. He lifts one, trembling, and points to the reflection in the gyrosphere. The reflection of the dinosaur behind them. The impossibly large one. The one that, just like them, is almost certainly not supposed to be there. When he speaks, his voice shakes too. “Five.”

Bev’s hands were flapping before Ben took them in his large ones and stilled them against his chest. She presses her face to her own enveloped hands, smelling his shirt, trying to calm herself down. Ben smells clean, like a baby. She likes that. Bill always smelled like weed. All the guys she’s dated smell like smoke of one kind or another. Smoke and mirrors. Illusions. But Ben -- Ben is solid. Real as real can be.

She takes a shaky breath and tries not to get too much snot on his chest. Tries not to wish Bill were there. She loves Ben -- she thinks she really might -- but Bill would know what to do, or at least pretend to. Bill would have a plan.

She pulls back. “What do we do?”

“The lady said not to leave the hotel,” Ben says. 

“Does that mean we’re not going to leave the hotel?”  
“I don’t know.” His brow furrows. They’d been told not to leave because there was some sort of breakdown -- the lady on the intercom hadn’t said _escaped dinosaurs,_ probably trying not to cause panic, but she’d sure implied it. And people are being shuttled off the island. One party at a time is being called to the front desk and then disappearing out a set of side doors. Ben went up to one of the green-shirted ushers to try and get some more information a few minutes ago, but she only told him that they were evacuating for “weather risk” and that he had to wait his turn to board the plane.

Not that their party can board, since five of them are out there in the open, sitting ducks for whatever might want to come along and pick them off. 

“Do you think they’re stupid enough not to come back here?” Bev asks Ben, leaning against his solid side and tilting her head up to look at his face. He looks thoughtful.

“I think they’d come back if they thought they were really in danger,” he says. “I think Bill and Mike and Stan would. So long as there wasn’t a little kid or pretty girl that needed saving on the way. It depends if the announcement went out to the rest of the park.”

“It must have,” Bev says. “Everyone else came back. The other guests, I mean.” The hotel lobby, where they’re waiting, is packed with people, though not too many for Bev to be positive that her people aren’t somewhere in the crowd. The tan marble floor is covered with the drips of a hundred pairs of boots.

Ben nods. “The thing that’s worrying me is that the communication lines might be down to certain parts of the park. This place wasn’t built to withstand gale-force winds.” He looks distastefully around the lobby.

Bev lifts her head from his chest. “They were at the aviary, right?”

“Yep.” Ben nods. “So we can ask around and see if anyone here came from there, but somehow I have a feeling that they had it to themselves, because --”

“Birds are boring as shit and there are literal dinosaurs here,” Bev agrees. “Yeah.” 

He smiles at her, his eyes so fond they’re almost sad. “Pretty much.”

“And Richie and Eddie?” She asks, just wanting him to talk, to distract her while she scans the room one more fruitless time, like her boys might be hiding behind a potted fern.

“Somehow I think they might be… a little…” He turns faintly red, not wanting to be indelicate.

“Distracted?”

“Distracted,” Ben agrees.

“Oh, those fuckers,” she whispers. “They better be safe.”

A Tyrannosaurus Rex sounds a lot like an engine starting. Liquid smooth, like a BMW Z1 1990, the kind of car Eddie’s only seen at the few shows he’s sneaked away to in Bangor and never on the road; not in Derry. It’s almost a purr.

But it’s not. It’s a roar.

“GO GO GO GO GO!” He yells, forgetting that he’s the one with his hand on the gas until Richie grabs it and rams the lever forward. His palm is dry. Eddie’s isn’t. He can feel sweat prickling along his hand, his back -- he can’t breathe. He yells instead, because if he doesn’t, he’s going to have an asthma attack. The gyrosphere spins. They’re moving. He can’t tell if they’re moving away from the thing or going in circles until they slow -- they don’t stop, they’re still moving, or maybe Eddie’s head is spinning -- and they see the T. Rex go for one of the dinosaurs they were watching fifteen seconds ago before Eddie felt like he was going to shit himself.

The gyrosphere stops. Sticks in the mud again. Spinning. “GO!” Eddie screams. His voice is embarrassingly high. He finds the brainspace to notice and cringe inwardly even as he yanks at the lever, trying to get them out of the mudpatch.

There’s no need. The T. Rex does it for them. It grabs one of the smaller dinosaurs in its teeth and swings it, keening with pain and fear, into the side of their vehicle. The gyrosphere doesn’t crack -- somehow -- but it goes flying and lands upside down a dozen meters away. 

“FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK,” Eddie yells. Next to him, Richie is bleeding. He’s not sure from where. They both grab for the lever again. It’s no use. Even if they were right-side-up, some internal mechanism is irreparably broken. The lever does nothing. Eddie pushes it once more for luck and it snaps off in his hand.

“Where did it go,” Richie whispers.

“Go?” Eddie looks up.

The four small dinosaurs are gone. Not gone -- dead, he realizes. All four of them.

But the T. Rex really is gone. He squeezes his eyes shut and prays. Something touches his hand and his whole body jerks before he realizes it’s Richie.

“Sorry,” Richie whispers (oh God oh fuck why is he  _ whispering  _ something really is wrong), pulling his hand away.

“No,” Eddie says, and grabs his hand again. He grips it as hard as he can, anchoring himself.

“We have to r--” Richie starts, and then the T. Rex makes a reappearance.

Stanley Uris is a pretty calm individual, generally speaking. He passed his SATs without much stress. He asked his first girl out without the help of the weed Richie offered him beforehand (and he made it through the subsequent turn-down without becoming inebriated then, either). He doesn’t remember it, but he also fought a hyperpowerful manifestation of hate with only the power of God and friendship on his side. And sure, he had a few breakdowns along the way. But that seems pretty reasonable, given the circumstances. 

And he was  _ eleven  _ when he did that!

The difference between all of those things and now is that for all of those things, he was prepared. He studied for the SAT until even Mike told him to take a break from hitting the books. (What resulted was one of the best nights of his life -- bowling with the entire Losers club, all together, which was a rarity in the later years of high school. It really hit different after a few weeks of nonstop studying.) He rehearsed his will-you-go-to-the-dance-with-me speech in the mirror when he asked Kathy Scatarella out. When they fought It, he carried his bird book and went over plans with the Losers in their clubhouse.

Prepared, Stanley Uris can handle anything. And he’s almost always prepared.

To be honest, he was prepared for this, with the exception of one thing. “This” being the breakdown of the park while the Losers are there. “This” being dinosaurs on the loose, trying to eat them. Unlike Eddie Kaspbrak, whose neuroses come mostly from trying to please an overbearing, abusive mother and very little from the genetic information she passed onto him, Stanley’s tendencies toward overpreparation are hardwired into him. 

But he can only prepare for so much. He had a plan for what to do if the park collapsed while they were there. He didn’t tell any of his friends -- they would have mocked him, and fairly; what were the odds? But he didn’t have a plan that included that one thing: being separated from Bill Denbrough.

(Yes, he had a plan that included meeting the girl of his dreams while he was at the park. A boy can dream, can’t he?)

But now he and the girl of his dreams are on their own.

Record scratch. Freeze frame. Rewind.

Stan, Bill, Mike, and Patty are leaving the bird enclosure when it all goes to shit. Bill is walking at the front of their little group. Mike is behind him. Stan and Patty are walking next to each other. Stan is trying to decide whether to hold her hand. It’s an exonerating circumstance, right? But they don’t  _ know  _ that something is wrong… and she doesn’t understand the severity of “Bill Denbrough Thinks That Something Bad Is About To Happen”. So she might be offended by him grabbing her hand. Then again, she might find his forwardness attractive? And it seemed like she was reciprocating his advances earlier...

Stan is running through the “I-meet-the-girl-of-my-dreams” plan again when the brontosaurus appears. 

“Is that dinosaur supposed to be there?” Patty asks. She’s squinting at it, and her eyelashes are  _ so  _ long…

“No,” Bill says. He sounds confident and sturdy, even though the  _ no  _ comes out as  _ n-n-no.  _ There’s no fear coloring the stutter.

“Guys, stay calm,” Mike says. “It probably won’t chase us. It’s not a carnivore. But, fair warning, herbivores are generally more dangerous. At least they are in terms of farm animals.”

Patty shoots Stan an incredulous look. He sends one back that says  _ yeah, they’re always like this.  _ It’s a look that any of the Losers would understand, but he realizes belatedly that it’s probably unreasonable to expect someone who’s known him for a few hours and not seven years to interpret it -- but she does. He can read it in her face. And how can he read _ her _ face, when he’s known her for only a few hours? The same way she can read his, maybe. They were made for each other, maybe.

Or maybe he’s just really scared right now, and instead of getting bold when he’s scared like Eddie does, or focused like Bill, Stan gets romantic when he feels like he’s about to piss himself with fear.

He sees Patty’s face, and then he turns back to the brontosaurus. It’s just standing there. It’s a few dozen meters away from the exit of the aviary, where they’re standing. They should probably go back inside.

And then it charges.

And Stan and Patty get separated from Bill and Mike.

And, oh, God, Stan isn’t prepared. Not for this.

The T. Rex spins their hamster ball like someone looking for a good place to start with their can opener and then lifts one finger. It’s a horribly human motion. Eddie clutches Richie’s hand tighter. His palm is sweating now. Their hands slip, but he doesn’t let go.

The T. Rex brings its finger down and punctures the glass. 

It tugs slowly down, righting them, opens its mouth, rears back --

The ball is too big to fit in its mouth. Eddie almost comments, but if Richie made a joke out of that, he’d lose his fucking mind. 

The T. Rex gnaws at the gyrosphere, trying to get it open, to get to the sweet meat inside.

It finds purchase and digs its teeth in. The sides of the orb crunch inward. Glass sprays their faces.

A feeling overtakes Eddie -- one that would take too long to describe. If he were to try to articulate it, he’d be dead before he finished. It feels sort of like numbness, but not quite. “Numb” implies indifference. And he’s not indifferent. He’s focused, lean, targeted -- his arms prickle and his mind surges with a hundred possibilities. It’s the way he felt in the tunnels, under Derry, when they fought the eye, when they fought It, although he doesn’t know it.

This is not the word he would use, but it is the most accurate one. Action in the face of fear: bravery. Everything crystallizes. It is very bright. The edges of the scene are sharp.

The T. Rex picks the ball up and brings it down. It weakens. Eddie can see the hairline cracks spreading across the curvature of the bottom where the dinosaur slammed it against the ground. He holds Richie’s hand (bravery) and fumbles with the catch on his seatbelt (bravery) and when the T. Rex brings the ball down again, they drop together to the grass.

It lifts the ball again. Eddie makes to run but Richie holds him down, wraps his arms around Eddie’s middle, and when the ball comes down again Eddie can feel the seat brush against his shoulder, but the glass doesn’t touch him.

When the ball goes up again, they run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come talk to me on tumblr @cranberryofficial !!!  
> also COMMENT to give me life. 1 comment = 1 year added to my life. if enough of you comment ill become immortal and i can chill with john mulaney and keanu reeves in 3029. (deadass tho i cannot stress enough how much i appreciate EVERY comment. i miss talking to people!! quarantine not based) <3

**Author's Note:**

> the sending-a-life-size-scarecrow-version-of-a-person-in-the-mail story is a true one. shoutout to my entirely male friend group for being Like That (male)
> 
> one comment = one time i don't talk to my friends who have only seen the 2017 IT in theaters once about characters whose names they don't know. save my friendships leave a comment
> 
> i just got a tumblr for this (rip) so come make it worthwhile @cranberryofficial  
> http://cranberryofficial.tumblr.com/


End file.
